The influence of quark energy loss on extracting nuclear sea quark distribution from nuclear Drell-Yan experimental data

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quark energy loss affects the extraction of nuclear sea quark distributions from Drell-Yan data, showing that energy loss significantly influences the interpretation of experimental results.

Contribution

It introduces a leading order analysis incorporating quark energy loss effects, improving the understanding of nuclear sea quark distribution extraction from Drell-Yan data.

Findings

Quark energy loss causes 3% to 11% suppression in Drell-Yan ratios.

Theoretical results with energy loss align well with experimental data.

Heavy target Drell-Yan data pose challenges for constraining nuclear sea-quark distributions.

Abstract

By means of two typical kinds of quark energy loss parametrization and the nuclear parton distributions determined only with lepton-nuclear deep inelastic scattering experimental data, a leading order analysis are performed on the proton-induced Drell-Yan differential cross section ratios of tungsten versus deuterium as a function of the quark momentum fraction in the beam proton and target nuclei. It is found that the theoretical results with quark energy loss are in good agreement with the experimental data. The quark energy loss effect produce approximately 3% to 11% suppression on the Drell-Yan differential cross section ratios $R_{W/D}$ in the range $0.05\leq x_2\leq0.3$. The application of nuclear Drell-Yan data with heavy targets is remarkably subject to difficulty in the constraints of the nuclear sea-quark distribution.